New York on a budget

Best free attractions

Free in New York is a strange category — a city that runs on entrance fees and dinner reservations keeps a parallel inventory of squares, parks, and waterfronts that ask nothing of you but your time. Most of them sit in Manhattan, where the grid leaves green negative space at calculated intervals, but the best of them spill across the East River into Brooklyn and down into the financial canyon. This list runs in rank order from the obvious — the great public park at the centre of Manhattan, the famous square the rest of the world thinks is the city — down to the genuine oddities: an islet on the East River no one lands on, a downtown park most visitors pass without ever seeing. Skip the open-top bus parade and use this list the way the locals do — as overlapping rest stops in a longer walk through the boroughs. Each entry is anchored to its Wikidata record so the geography is verifiable before you go.